


quiver (because nothing stands between us here).

by amorremanet



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 30 Days of SPN Women, Angst, Canonical Character Death, Community: 100_women, Community: dailyfics, Deathfic, Demons, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-23
Updated: 2012-02-23
Packaged: 2017-11-03 22:10:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/386523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amorremanet/pseuds/amorremanet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Kill Sam and Dean Winchester. Bela's task has five simple words that are infinitely complicated in all their subtleties and nuances…</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	quiver (because nothing stands between us here).

**Author's Note:**

  * For [an_ardent_rain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/an_ardent_rain/gifts).



Kill Sam and Dean Winchester. Bela's task has five simple words that are infinitely complicated in all their subtleties and nuances—she turns the car's heater on, shivers even though it's plenty warm outside and she has her leather jacket on, besides. Grazing her teeth over her lower lip, Bela feels her face trying to shed its color. As though it has any less to lose. She reaches up, just to double-check the sprigs of Devil's Shoestring she has fastened behind the sun shield—the twig and its dried leaves crackle under her fingers but, fortunately, don't snow down on her.

Bela can do this—she knows that she can. It's like she told those flannel-coated pains in her ass before: _who here hasn't shot a few people?_ Bela certainly has. Doing Sam and Dean in should be a cakewalk. She has the receipt for Pennsylvania's Erie Hotel. She has that magical slip of paper that says not only what town they're in, but also that they're sleeping in Room 15. She has her pistol with the silencer, and she has her orders from Crowley and Lilith. Kill the boys and she'll be set—off the hook, out of her Deal, not slated to die at midnight…

So why does she feel so nauseated just thinking about it all? Why has her head started struggling just to swim, like a drowning rat?

The Deal, obviously. That's the only answer that makes sense—the Deal's set her on the edge of a razor. Her impending doom looms over her and makes her teeth clatter without doing anything. And then there's everything else… The numbers on her clock's digital display. The dull crunching of the gravel underneath her tires. The sick, hideous, ponderous pounding of her heart inside her chest. How it rattles around in the cavity, banging off of her ribs and her lungs until she ends up gasping for breath, feeling frozen and wet like she's back in the graveyard with the sailor's ghost bearing down on her, even though she knows she's not, can feel that her skin is dry.

The way she's seen demons everywhere—how she's recognized them not by their black eyes, but by their _true_ faces, the real ones beneath their meat-suits. They come in different colors—ink black, ebony, grey like industrial smoke, blood red, the bleached white of bones left in the sun, plenty more besides—and they have different personal touches. Claws or talons, varying types of horns, fangs of different sizes, gaping maws filled with rows of teeth, like sharks. One she gets a glimpse of while she's gassing up in New Canaan? Has an expansive set of wings, somehow even darker than its black body, as though its color was where light came to die…

The only things they all had in common were their skin (gnarled and knotted, scarred with the aftershocks of being hacked apart and sliced open and healed again, and again, and _again_ ) and the way their true faces seemed to blur around the edges, the way they seemed to move independently of how they moved their human hosts—bending backwards in ways that defied all logic and anatomy that Bela knows, double-jointed in an extreme, as though nothing supported their joints at all…

Oh, and one other thing. Naturally. Too much to ignore, no matter how much Bela wishes that she could—they also shared the effect that they had on Bela, when she saw them. Each one made her chest ice over, made her bones ache with how cold everything seemed to get, made all the places she's been injured before writhe and twist and feel like frostbite, like the injuries are fresh all over again. Worst of all was the pang in all the places where Lilith's taken Bela's various failures out of her ass—her back and legs for losing the Hand of Glory; her hands and feet for losing the rabbit's foot; both cheeks and the back of her neck for getting the Colt, but not as quickly as Lilith wanted it…

Even worse than the cold, though, and even worse than the pain? Was the reminder that pounded against the back of Bela's mind, no matter where she was when she saw the creatures: no one else has ever wrangled their way out of a Crossroads Deal, any kind of Deal with Lilith and Crowley; Bela's crafty, she's clever and intelligent, she knows what she's doing… but her time's slipping through her fingers and nothing she's done so far has managed to save her life…

It doesn't matter that she shouldn't have to die for wanting to get out of that house, wanting revenge on her purposely ignorant mother and the oppressive monolith of her father. Demons don't care for the specifics outside of using them to manipulate people into making Deals, into playing right into Hell's hands. They don't concern themselves with who did or didn't spend their childhood getting kicked around and victimized and abused, or with whose motivations are what, pure or impure. Nothing really matters to them. Nothing but their ineffable bottom line.

In all likelihood, killing Sam and Dean won't make a difference. Bela's going to die. The hounds are going to drag her to Hell, and she's going to become a broken, twisted shade—an horrific parody of herself, beaten and reset to be a monster—and there won't be anything she can do about it.

Any attempt at banishing these thoughts just makes Bela's heart sink, until it's past her stomach and trying to worm its way out of her body entirely.

The ticking of the her watch bangs inside Bela's ears—it's a vintage piece, the only family heirloom she didn't pawn, and even with it squirreled away in her pocket, she can hear it beating—every second zips by, but still manages to drag in front of her, looming over her head and saying nothing, all the worse in its silence. She flexes her fingers around the steering wheel, tries to focus on the road, on the music, on Nina Simone crooning at her, Brecht and Weill's "Pirate Jenny," one of Bela's old favorites… Bela nods, sighs and slinks back into her seat, sliding against the leather's cold caress. She tries to hum along, mouth the lyrics in places…

 _Then one night, there's a scream in the night_ —That's no comfort now, is it. She's always considered how her parents' screams must sound, the noise they're bound to have made in Hell. Bela takes for granted that this is where her parents wound up. After what her father did? After the frozen steel grip of his hands traversing her body, clenching his fingers around her arms until they bruised, jerking her—only eleven when it started, skinny and too small to fight, to say nothing of how well she already knew the dark, dusty cover that settled on her, dulled her complexion and her hair, every time he rose his thundering voice. Every time he clinked the ice in his tumblers of gin, shot her that icicle glare of his and hissed, _Abigail, bedroom. **Now**._

The fingerprints of that covering raise up now, creeping all over Bela's skin, crawling like she's got a tidal wave of spiders coming out of nowhere and cocooning her. Glancing up at her reflection in the rearview mirror, Bela would swear that the same effects are coming out of the woodwork with her memories of her father assaulting her, both the physical ones and the verbal ones. Her skin has the grayish tint of corpses, and her hair looks darker—but not just as though the color's dulled.

No, no, that would be too simple. Too comfortable for Bela. Too kind to her stomach, which roils like she's going to be sick, even though she hasn't eaten today. Hasn't had anything aside from some tea in the morning. No… now, her hair has the deep, mousy shade she had before she learned about salon highlights and started hiding behind them, recreating herself as the great thief she's become, molding Abigail Stoker into Bela Talbot, a lone wolf who doesn't need anyone, doesn't want anyone, doesn't trust anyone.

And the worst part? The recollections and the covering make themselves at home on top of her. They settle in like old friends—they feel like permafrost on top of her, like they'll never leave again…

 

Bela doesn't pause in her work until the last minute. She chases after it with dogged determination, forcing herself to laugh because nothing feels right and if anything can set her mind at ease—even if there's a simple promise of that—Bela has to follow it and hope for the best. When she does stop, she's reached the Erie Hotel, stormed into Room 15 and shot at two inflatable dolls that slept in Sam and Dean's bed… Her skin crawls again as she answers the phone; when she breaks down and the tears charge through her dam of emotional suppression, everything feels so cold that it burns.

She reaches for her pocket, fumbles around in it, but futilely so. She's not going to find anything, much less what she needs right now. The Devil's Shoestring is still down in her car—she should've brought it with her, but she didn't think when she slipped out of the car. She trusted in herself too much.

She trembles, hearing the hounds outside the window—even if she can't see them, she knows they're there by the heavy sound of their breaths, by their low, throaty growls, by the bear-trap way they snap their jaws… And even without those tells, the hounds do the same thing that demons do. They freeze the air around them. Bela's legs quiver beneath her as she stands, clacks her nosebleed heels on the floor, on the short walk over do the window. Some people die with their boots on; Bela, on the other hand, will not die without her favorite pair of Prada stilettos.

She's known for ten years that this would happen. She's seen it coming on the horizon and counted down the days she had left. She's celebrated every anniversary of her Deal because, even if it was one less year she had to live, it was one more year (in earth-time, anyway) that her parents spent in Hell, suffering for their sins in ways that Bela shuddered to think of, could scarcely even imagine. She's planned for this, inasmuch as she needed to plan for anything—and everything's going exactly as it should, exactly as she drew the steps out in her mental maps of this eventuality…

Except for the chill that breezes in behind her, snakes up to her back and slithers a set of arms around her waist, caresses her like they've done this every night for years. Except for the hand that fumbles down her chest and stomach, scrapes fingernails at her thigh through the fabric of her trousers. Except for the slender, dextrous fingers that brush up her hair, then shepherd a lock of it behind her ear. Except for the ice cube lips that exhale on the back of her neck, shove her hair aside to ghost kisses across her skin.

Except for the voice that tinkles like the upper keys of a piano as it whispers: "oh, Sweetheart… did you really think I'd let a precious gem like you get away from me?" Lilith pauses. Sighs. Tuts at Bela and flicks her tongue against the knot at the base of Bela's neck, digs her teeth into it. "No, no, baby… I know you must be thinking that I only want you to fuel the fires, but it's not like that. It never has been. You're not like all those other dregs—those subhumans we have to make the grunt forces out of… You're different, Abby. You're special. And I can give you better than you've ever dreamed…"

Bela doesn't believe a word of it, not that what she thinks matters. Regardless of what she _thinks_ , Lilith grips onto Bela's hand, laces their fingers together and squeezes like a vise. Bela's bones creak under the force of Lilith's embrace, but her heart calms its hideous tattoo for the first time in hours. Her body sags with exhaustion, leaning back into Lilith's hold. Bela's tired. She doesn't want to fight anymore. She just wants to go home—to some mythical place called home that she hasn't been able to find since she kissed her first demon.

"Come along, Kitten," Lilith purrs, nosing at Bela's hair. "The Pit's waiting for us. Me and my new Princess… I'll even call off the hounds if you don't put up a fuss and let me take you willingly…"


End file.
